Jacques Herzog: The Perez Art Museum "is a naked structure"

Jacques Herzog of Herzog & de Meuron explains how the Pérez Art Museum Miami was designed so that everything is visible and there is no strict barrier between inside and outside, in our second movie from Miami.

"The building is a naked structure; everything you see is at the same time structural and space-making," Herzog tells Dezeen. "There is no inside/outside, there is nothing that is masked, so everything that you get is doing all that you expect from architecture. In that sense it's a very honest or very archaic architecture."

Herzog & de Meuron's Pérez Art Museum Miami opened to the public last week in downtown Miami and accommodates 3000 square-metres of galleries within a three-storey complex with a huge elevated veranda.

A car park is on show beneath the building, while a single roof shelters both indoor and outdoor spaces.

"Typologically you could say that this is a building built on stilts," says the architect. "Layers end with a trellis-like roof and start with a platform which is also kind of a trellis, under which you can park your car and that also is open to the elements. Literally everything is visible, is part of the whole."

The architect describes how galleries were designed to open out to the veranda so that "landscape would walk inside the building".

"We wanted to do buildings that are transparent or permeable, so that inside/outside would not be a strict barrier," he explains.

Exhibition galleries occupy the two lower floors of the museum and were organised to encourage a fluid transition between spaces.

"The special concept of the museum is this kind of sequence of spaces, which are more fluid," says Herzog. "It's a new kind of museum typology, which we believe was right to do here."